The Bridge: Fifty Years Across the Forth

In 1958, Scotland embarked on a huge construction project

which would be six years in the making.

One young film-maker was given unique access to record

the building of this feat of modern engineering.

His intimate footage helps tell the story behind one of Scotland's

greatest landmarks

and provides new insight into our industrial heritage.

The Forth Road Bridge was to be the longest stretch

of suspended roadway anywhere in Europe.

No British engineer had ever built anything like it.

Today, 50 years on,

it carries some 24 million vehicles across the Forth every year.

There is always a wee shiver of fear before you start.

Not fear but just a bit of anticipation.

Bridgemaster and Chief Engineer Barry Colford

has worked on the Forth Road Bridge for 18 years.

I had never really appreciated the size of Forth Road Bridge

and when I got here, I was astounded by the scale of it.

Today, Barry and Engineering Manager Chris Tracey are inspecting

the huge cable from which the road is suspended.

Chris! Did you see the paint there?

Yeah, the sealing looks quite good, though.

Bridges are about connectivity between places

and big bridges capture the public's imagination.

The bridge is working very hard.

It's not been designed for the level of traffic that it's taking today.

It's taking almost 50% more load than it was ever designed for.

All of the traffic, all the load

and the weight of the bridge is suspended in midair.

It's very simple.

It's just like a rope bridge over the Andes, except it's made of steel.

It's just flaking a wee bit in places.

Just a...minor, minor areas of flaking in that paintwork.

I had a cine camera. I was interested in making films.

I heard that the big scheme of a new bridge across the Forth was

coming up, so I thought I'd try and record it.

In his spare time, amateur film maker Jim Hendry decided to

document the building of the Forth Road Bridge.

I would go down occasionally, probably at the weekend

and see what was happening and just take what was going on

at the time but very soon, I met the resident engineer, Jack Hamilton.

He was very helpful

and took me across the river in his wee boat a few times.

Mr Hamilton must have spoken to the men because I just went on

and they took me to whatever was happening and I filmed it happening.

It was... I was given great access.

A farm inspector by day, Jim filmed throughout the entire

six years of the build, from 1958 to 1964.

None of his film has ever been televised until now.

I've got quite a good head for heights so it didn't worry me

too much.

Remember I was 30 then, not 88 as I am now!

By the time the bridge was begun, a ferry service had been

running across the Firth of Forth at Queensferry for almost 1,000 years.

At its peak, the service ran every 15 minutes.

Four boats - they ran until the end of the service

when the bridge opened and I was on the Robert the Bruce.

Well, they left from the pier behind me here.

There were just two piers there.

One boat was at the south side and one boat was at the north side.

Another two were in the middle

so that when your neighbour was coming into the north side,

you were leaving.

And when you got to the south side and unloaded and loaded again,

the other boat was coming to chase you out again.

Four lanes of traffic.

From here up... right up to the anchor gates.

I started on the ferries when I was 15.

And I was there until the service finished and fair enjoyed it.

Between them, former ferry skippers Jim Taylor and Stephen Reid served

almost 40 years carrying passengers between North and South Queensferry.

When they first mentioned a bridge, I thought,

"Right, it's times I was thinking about something else."

Well, you just accepted there was going to be a bridge there.

Everybody kept talking about it but it seemed to come on very sudden.

My father had a kiosk on the pier that sold teas and coffees

and everything.

You were very busy in the morning with the people going to Edinburgh

and coming over from Edinburgh.

They took roughly 30 cars.

They'd take lorries, buses, caravans and passengers, of course.

Every day was different, every trip was different.

Different traffic, different weather conditions, different tides.

On a Sunday, they would come down from Edinburgh by bus.

Never had cars. Cross on the ferry. That was their Sunday trip.

A look round the village, boat back and a bus to Edinburgh again.

That was their Sunday outing.

We had very many regular travellers. Hundreds of regular travellers.

You know, you didn't know their names.

You looked at their car coming down the pier and said,

"Here's a tea without milk and a pie," or whatever they wanted, you know.

You had it ready for them.

Probably roundabout the early '50s,

it began to be mooted that there was going to be a bridge in the future.

So it just was a very real fear that we were going

to lose our livelihoods eventually.

The queues for the ferry boats, especially at weekends,

used to come all along the front. Right along the prom.

The traffic was enormous at this side, traffic going south.

We were running half the night trying to clear the traffic.

They'd been trying for at least 200 years to get a bridge or a

tunnel to cross the Forth, because they were aware that this was

a main link between the south of Scotland and the Highlands.

Going back a bit to the early '50s,

you could sit at the pier for 15 minutes and leave with nothing.

Nobody had cars.

And then all of a sudden, everybody had cars and we just couldn't cope.

Cars for the first time

really became available to working-class population.

Before that, you had to be rich to own a car.

You could see they needed a bridge. It was hopeless.

RADIO: 'Broke down just now. We had 8-8 out earlier and he's not logged off.

'Just wondering if he's still out.'

There are about 70 people here working full-time.

And 40 odd of these are involved in maintenance.

For Bridgemaster Barry Colford and his team,

keeping the bridge functioning is a huge operation.

These are our maintenance painters who are painting all of these

sets of hangers, all 700-odd of them,

sets of hangers and we're doing this side, the west side this year.

Since bridge tolls were abolished in 2008,

the maintenance programme has been funded by the Scottish government.

The bridge itself, this structure,

cost about £12 million to build in 1964.

To date, £259 million has been spent on the operation

and maintenance of the bridge since it was opened.

We have staff in the control room,

working 24-7 because we carry out works overnight.

And our maintenance crews are then working on the carriageway,

work that they can't do during the day because it would cause too

much disruption but outwith overnight working, we're working painting,

welding, fabricating bits of steel, repairing, patching.

It is a continuous job and it has been since the bridge was opened.

In 1958, the first pile of the Forth Road Bridge

was driven into the rock under the waters of the Firth of Forth.

The Forth was the first, the largest suspension bridge

outside of America and it was the largest in Europe.

At the time, the longest suspension bridge in the world

was San Francisco's Golden Gate.

Its distinctive design was what the ambitious

bridge across the Forth was to be based on.

Basically, there are two ropes

and the two ropes are supported at either end just by the towers

and the anchorages and all the load from the deck and the vehicles,

every vehicle and every pedestrian and cyclist who crosses it,

is supported by those two cables via the vertical hanger ropes

that take the load from the deck up to the main cables.

It must have taken a tremendous leap of faith by the engineers

who designed it, to be able to say "That will work",

because the leap from what was built before was quite large.

Everything had to be tested and double-tested, because it was new.

You know, for the engineers it was new, for the workmen it was new.

Everybody was learning on the job.

RADIO: 'Wind tunnel tests confirm that slender suspension bridges

'can be liable in a steady wind to both vertical bending and tortional oscillation.'

What we do know is that the three big bridges that had been

built in the world before then were all built in rather benign...

more benign climates than here.

The thing they were afraid of was the repetition

of the Tacoma Rapids Bridge in America.

It literally shook itself to bits in gales not half

the strength of the ones that hit the Forth.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge had failed in 1941

and that was a significant shock to the engineering community.

The stiffening girder here is there because of Tacoma.

The bridge was made a lot stiffer

because of the lessons learned at Tacoma.

By the time construction began in September 1958, the estimated

cost of the bridge with its new approach roads was £16.2 million.

No company in the UK was large enough to take on the job alone

so a consortium, the ACD Bridge Company, was formed.

The company set about assembling a workforce from all over the country.

When I was at school and I heard about the bridge,

they started to build concrete towers beside us,

actually beside my mother's house and I says,

"I'm going to get a job on the bridge."

And I went down on the Friday when I left school and they said,

"Start Monday." And that was me. I was so proud.

I was a typist.

And I just did all sorts of things. I also...

SHE LAUGHS

I can remember washing the engineer's socks!

My first job that I had after leaving college was with Mot, Hay and Anderson,

who along with Freeman Fox and Partners were the consulting engineers for the bridge.

I joined as a student.

Because you had to do summer placements

and I was lucky to get a job on the Forth Bridge.

They took over this house, which was right in the site at the bridge

and I worked in the office there.

And we had our lunch there every day.

-Yeah, yeah. Corned beef hash.

-Corned beef hash. Mince pies.

They were all young lads

and they used to have these big thick socks that they wore

under their boots or their wellingtons and what have you

and they would say, "Do you think you could wash these through for me?"

Wonderful camaraderie between the staff members and what not.

It was a unique situation with so many of us

at the same age group and no, working hard but playing hard as well.

Amongst the first workers on the site was a team of highly

experienced deep-sea divers.

Generally, there were about four divers at a time,

two on the north side, two on the south side, working on the coffer dams.

The divers worked alone under the deep,

dark waters of the River Forth.

Their main task was assisting in the building of the huge coffer dams,

into which the two main towers would be sunk.

The idea of the coffer dams was to pump the water out eventually

and then the engineers could work in the dry.

Because you had to jackhammer some rock away, clear stones and mud

away to get sandbags or concrete bags in to seal up the leaking parts and

then they put the pipes down through and the concrete was pumped in.

And that was basically the job.

And without the divers,

that particular job could not have been done.

It needed a human diver there to do the jobs that had to be done

underwater, otherwise it could not have been done.

The building of a bridge then was a lot different than how

bridges are built now. It was very labour-intensive.

There was a lot of plant on site but a lot more labour-intensive than it is now.

Diving into the Forth and sometimes it could be very, very cold

and you were as quick as you could get down to the job to get started,

because once you started working, you warmed up.

All divers in black water work by touch.

It's just like being a blind person.

Film-maker Jim Hendry was there to document those early stages.

Well, it was time to build up the story of the whole thing going on.

I'm a fairly mechanically minded person

and I started looking forward myself to each stage coming on.

After the divers had got a firm base, they put...concrete was poured

until it came above sea level and er,

then the heavy boxes of the main towers started to arrive.

The towers were being erected and they came in big sections

and one section got lifted on top of another.

And there came the day when the last section was lifted up.

The biggest moment was when they got the towers built

and they got the towers built, the tower started to sway,

and it was swivelling, I think it was six feet, either way.

The Americans actually thought it was going to collapse,

the main towers.

I remember being up there and you got the impression that you were still

but when you looked at the railway bridge, it was going up and down.

So it was the ultimate feeling of seasickness.

And we had to put cables and a shock absorber system to damp out

the sway of the towers, until the cables were put on top.

Working at height presented challenges for the workers

but it was the weather that was their worst enemy.

The wind came up - 15 minutes, you could have a full-scale storm

and just hit you as quick as that

and just the whole bridge was jumping all over the place.

Really quite frightening to see masses of steel

moving about how it did.

There were a couple of very bad winters.

The hand walks were coated with ice.

And they had to bring in special heating to thaw things out

in the morning and by night-time, they were frozen up again.

It was cold.

I mean, there were no what you call thermal underwear at that time

and people wore ski trousers or an old pair of pyjama trousers or

something like that underneath,

because it was cold and the draught came right up your legs.

You know, you'd put something around your ankles, that type of thing.

The building of the bridge had a huge impact on communities

living on both sides of the Forth estuary.

New approach roads had to be built north and south of the bridge

and anything that stood in their path was bulldozed.

The only part that we recognise is the Admiral, some of the Admiral's trees.

-Yeah.

-The rest's gone.

For sisters Jeanette Ewing and Anne Turnbull,

the arrival of the bridge was to change their families' lives forever.

We grew up at Ferrytoll Cottage. It was on its own.

Beautiful house inside.

All the huge fields to play in,

the swamp to play in and the Forth to fish in. It was beautiful.

We were the wild children!

The Davises. Everybody knew us.

The Davis family had lived at Ferrytoll Cottage on the north side

of the Firth of Forth for three generations.

It was an old harbour where the boats came in

and then the dockyard reclaimed that land that we called the Swamp.

It wasn't a swamp. But it was our swamp.

-Ferrytoll Cottage would be over there, wouldn't it?

-Yeah.

They got a letter from the Government and my father ignored it, didn't he?

Yeah, he didn't want to know.

And then he got another one saying that he had to get out

because there was going to be the building of the bridge.

And he just ignored it and ignored it until it was too late.

They were blasting for the new road, for the new motorway onto the bridge.

Just opposite.

And one day, my mother was sitting in the toilet and a great big

boulder came flying through the roof and it broke the bath in half.

We were at school and when we came home and there was workmen on the roof

putting a tarpaulin on it and my mother was very shaken, wasn't she?

-She certainly was.

-And we went into the toilet and there was no bath.

It was just shattered.

And that was that. It had just come right through. It was devastating.

We found out we were moving to a council house in Dunfermline.

All the furniture was either given away,

sold or burnt in the back garden. All beautiful antique furniture.

Our father would have clung on, roof or no roof.

-I think we all would have.

-Yes.

-Didn't want to leave.

-It was a bereavement.

-It was heartbreaking, wasn't it?

-Yeah.

To give the bridge workers access to the newly assembled steel

towers, wire mesh catwalks were installed high above the water.

The catwalk is made up of these 20 ropes, wire ropes,

with panels ten foot by ten foot, wire mesh panels

and they were formed into 300-foot trains.

The erectors would sit on the mesh panels

and jump with their feet to overcome the initial friction,

to move the panels ten feet

so that the next panel could be put on at the tower top.

Actually, the catwalks was open mesh, wire mesh.

Big sides of them.

You weren't going to fall off them or anything like that.

Unless you bounced down, as we did, because it was bouncy.

You just walked right up the middle of the mesh.

You had wire either side of you, there was wire either side.

You used to just walk up.

I'd rather walk it as take the boat, cos I used to get seasick!

As the temporary walkways neared completion,

everybody wanted to be first to walk across the Firth.

One man was officially acknowledged as the first to cross on foot.

Jimmy Laverty, the steel erecting foreman, he actually got

a medal for walking right across the bridge from one end to the other.

Jim Hendry made sure he was there to film the moment.

I just followed him out.

Just in the middle of the bridge and I did ask him

to look over the edge and cut in a shot then of a ship passing.

I was leaning on one of the wire ropes and steadied the camera

that way because a film camera that's jumping about, you can't look at it.

Steel foreman Jimmy Laverty was undoubtedly the first to

cross the completed catwalks but two young engineers,

determined to be first over the river,

had in fact made it across before the walkways were finished.

They had not quite finished the mesh.

-But we weren't going to be stopped, were we?

-No, no!

We tightroped across this wire!

Tightrope act down the cables

so that we could become the first people to cross the bridge.

And we were. As we came off that last bit onto the ground, we counted one, two,

-three and stepped off together.

-So we were first equal.

-Shake my hand!

-First equal!

It was challenging.

The men were out on the catwalks, as I say,

for about eight hours continuous and one of the things which they...

we did was that we had tea boys, with big urns on their back.

Kevin Minelli, he used to take this soup up on his back

and he was a tea boy, used to walk right up the catwalk mesh and

delivering them a cup of soup each.

It started off as stock on the Monday morning

and by the time it was up on the mesh on a Friday,

you needed a knife and fork for this thick, warm soup!

Health and safety was - I wouldn't say it was non-existent

but it wasn't anything like to a standard that it is today.

Health and safety regulations were not quite so rigorous in those days.

It was all common sense then.

People say that they needed nerves of steel

but I think possibly that they didn't have nerves, that they

just were at home in that kind of environment.

Safety was nil. Safety was nil compared to nowadays.

My philosophy was that to go wherever the erectors went,

if it was safe enough for me to go, it was safe enough for the erectors.

Seven men died in the making of the bridge

but only four men died on the bridge itself.

The first one was Kevin Minelli.

He was actually coming out of the cabin when the winch,

the winch, the snatch block snapped

and it hit Kevin dead centre in the head and killed him that day.

And I knew him very well.

I knew him very well, me being a tea boy as well.

There was two fatalities when the safety net collapsed.

And you're looking over the bridge. You couldn't do anything.

You just looked and one of them was hanging onto the scaffolding baton. He lived.

Bobby Orr.

I was actually speaking to him that morning before he went up onto

the bridge and I told him, "Be very careful, Bobby, when you go up there,"

and it was a toss-up between him and Eddie Rose, who went up

and Bobby says, "I'll go up." And he went up and he lost his life.

Eddie Rose packed in a fortnight after it.

He finished up a fortnight after it.

We were all floored because we all knew one another.

Total gentleman.

Not like a steel erector like the rough and ready.

He was a total gentleman. A wee moustache and that.

He was quite a guy.

Quite quiet but I couldn't believe he was gone, you know.

And Ted Davis. I knew him as well. He was never, ever found dead.

22 June, 1962 saw the single worst accident of the whole bridge project.

The Masterton viaduct, a large section of one of the approach roads,

collapsed, trapping four men beneath it. Only one survived.

Naturally, whenever there's a very serious accident, all work stops

and men are sent home.

You just... Nobody thought about a safety belt.

You just got up and walked along the steel and all the rest of it.

And now, you've got to have your lanyards,

you've got to be hooked on at all times.

All times. Which is a good thing.

RADIO: 'Fred from nine-nine, over.'

Two bridge personnel accessing the top cord on the southwest main span.

'Top cord, south west.'

The function that me and George serve is to come out here,

look at all the different elements on the structure itself.

We're looking for any defects that might be there

so that we can then go in, record them, pass them on to the appropriate

maintenance supervisor who can then arrange for repairs to be done.

Bridge inspectors Traci Liebisch and George Elliot

spend their days examining every bolt and beam on the bridge.

Today, we're going down onto the top cord

and basically just make sure everything is all right.

It's 50 years old now

so we're basically constantly got to keep monitoring it, checking it.

It's very important, very important indeed.

The enormous increase in the volume of traffic over the years has

caused significant problems for the bridge's ageing components.

Tracy is now carrying out inspection of the bolt clusters, just to see

if there's any broken, sheared, anything likely to be a defect.

I mean, she's a grand old lady.

I personally feel she's quite a historic monument

and Scotland should be proud of having a bridge like this

so I think she's done not bad in her 50 years so, yeah, I am.

I'm very proud to work on the structure like this that's known worldwide.

New, we have the primary beams.

Bottom laterals. Pinned posts.

Rainwater downpipes, et cetera, et cetera.

TRAFFIC DROWNS OUT SPEECH

Whilst small parts can be readily replaced,

some much more significant work is needed underneath the road.

Users can't see it but underneath the deck,

there are joints which are wearing out and there's over 700 of them.

Beneath the suspended carriageway,

many of the steel joints are so worn as to need replaced -

a problem which enhances an already distinctive

part of the bridge's identity.

All our users are aware of the thump every 18 metres as the vehicle goes across.

It's a difficult one to solve.

It will cost a lot of money to replace these joints

and we'd have to close the carriageway to do it. It is a significant job.

In 2009, it was concluded that this and other essential work

could not be done without huge disruption to bridge users.

Not long afterwards, the decision was made to build a new bridge across the Forth.

Currently under construction, the Queensferry Crossing is due

to open in 2016, leaving the future uncertain for the Forth Road Bridge.

The Government have determined that this bridge, the existing

Forth Road Bridge, will become a public transport corridor and the new bridge

will take all general traffic, all motorway traffic, so instead of

70,000 vehicles crossing the bridge, there'll be a couple of hundred.

I certainly remember when they spun the cables to go over the bridge.

It was 24 hours a day and it was a big wheel and it went back

and forward and back and forward and it was like a humming,

like a humming noise.

On 17 November 1961, the men began the most difficult

part of the bridge's construction - the task of creating the main

suspension cable, using a method known as cable spinning.

The system of spinning the cables was a fantastic one

and that was something that had never been done in this country before.

It was an American idea,

using a wheel to take the strands across the water.

That was a new technique and it was very successful.

The main cable is made up of over 11,000 steel wires.

The process of spinning the cable involved each individual wire

being carried across the Forth via a large pulley system.

Workers on the catwalk guided it into place around the clock.

It was night and day. It was night and day.

I used to hear it from the house going across.

You could hear the rattle of the wire going across.

At either side of the river as the wires reached their destination,

they were embedded in concrete plugs known as anchorages,

created to hold the bridge up.

The creation of the cable anchorages involved blasting a huge

tunnel into the rock on both sides of the river.

When they were blasting out the anchorage at the south side,

they took me over and took me down the anchorage chamber

in a tub, bucket,

and it was on rails, down into the anchorage

and I got a waterproof and a hard hat

and clambered into this bucket and I always remember, it was the water

dripping, dripping out of there and it was like a big cavern and that

was what they filled with concrete and that's where the cables went to.

This is the really serious end, the business end of the bridge.

This is the place where the bridge is held up.

This anchorage extends into a rock tunnel down at the bottom here and

that rock tunnel extends for about 60 to 70 metres down into the rock.

Each of these strands here is taking about 350 tonnes of load.

So that's trying to pull this concrete plug out of the ground.

The concrete plug is only held in place by friction

and that's what's holding the bridge up.

The spinning of the cable took nine months

with some 30,000 miles of wire being carried back

and forth across the water, often in high winds and extreme conditions.

During cable spinning, we lost 33% of our time

and this was because the winds could blow these cables, going back

and forward across the river and hung 3,300 feet.

Just looking through my diary,

I discovered

the notes of February 1962

um, and it talks of exceptionally strong gales -

123mph recorded in Lanarkshire during Sunday night and Monday morning.

It caused heavy damage to the cables which were being spun.

The cable from the north tower to the north side tower,

the temporary restraints and ropes around it burst with the wind

and it started to splay apart.

And these wires were thrashing around and got entangled like a girl's pigtail.

And the next day when the wind stopped and we got back

on the bridge, there was telephones embedded inside this and equipment.

It took weeks to get all this stuff back out, untangled from the cable.

And the men paced out on the catwalks to untangle these

and so we lost four weeks, due to that storm.

It's getting up to the point of early afternoon.

We're starting to get traffic building up for peak.

Peak can start any time after 3.30pm and finish after 7.30-8.00pm at night.

Northbound, we'll be about ten minutes on the northbound.

Not much more than that. I'll just check the southbound for you.

Southbound is running fine. There's no queues or delays there.

Okey-doke. Cheers, then. Bye now. Bye.

In 2004, it became clear that the once state-of-the-art

suspension cables were no longer able to cope with the average

two million vehicles the bridge carries every month.

We found corrosion within the main cables themselves, so we've

carried out rehabilitation work. We have installed dehumidification

which involves blowing dry air very gently through the cabling.

The idea is, corrosion is caused by two agents - moisture and oxygen.

If we can get rid of one of them, we can get rid of corrosion.

We don't know what happens to wires that are already cracked.

Will they break in future?

What we have done is we've slowed down any rate of deterioration.

This is the dehumidification chamber we're passing just now.

This provides the dry air for pumping into the main cable to keep it

dry and keep moisture out to prevent further corrosion

and that further corrosion is the thing that would reduce

the strength of the cable so we're trying to avoid that.

When we reported that we couldn't give an unconditional

guarantee about the future strength of the main

cable in Forth Road Bridge, the government, I think quite

rightly, decided to go ahead with the planning of the new crossing.

By 1963, with the towers and cable in place,

the suspended road deck began to emerge.

When we started on deck erection, that was building a Meccano set

and we built it from the towers out the way.

The steel erectors had the biggest job, bolting it all together

and it was big plates, the box girders, splice plates we cry them.

I certainly can remember thinking, is it going to meet

in the middle when it's stretched out over the water.

This is a precision piece of work.

You see them coming out bit by bit and it's like,

almost like digging a tunnel, you know

you wonder if it's going to match up when you get to the point.

I was there, going across in a boat,

when the two ends were to meet in the middle.

And the bridge was actually whipping a bit. The two open ends were just whipping.

A funny old sight.

Would the bridge come down, and that type of thing, was in your mind.

On 20 December 1963,

the north and south sections of the bridge were joined in the middle,

forming the basis of the fourth-longest suspended span of steel roadway in the world.

A helicopter came in and men were standing,

watching the two ends coming together. That was quite a day.

I think I had to struggle to get a decent place to put my tripod that day!

They had flags on either end and they hoisted it in.

And it fitted perfectly.

And to see them just clicking into place was fabulous.

Then there was Vat 69 from South Queensferry.

They issued everybody on the bridge with a miniature of whisky

and we were all rejoicing when that happened.

The people who built the bridge

and the engineers who designed it without computers,

with seven figure log tables - it's quite incredible how well it's built,

when you look at what they had, the tools they had to do it with.

I can't help but start to look at it after a while,

a bit like a long line of washing, you know.

Cos you've got all these lines hanging down and the more I learn

about the engineering of the bridge, and having been back and forth across it,

it's the sense that it's actually quite a precarious structure.

It actually gets more delicate as I look at it rather than less,

so you've got this amazing tension between

sort of really tough engineering but stretched over this huge space.

Most images you see of the Forth Road Bridge are probably photography,

right from it's very start, it has been photographed massively

but it doesn't naturally lend itself to drawing or painting as such.

There are people that say the road bridge is just a viewing platform for the rail bridge

but I think of them a bit like a salt-and-pepper, you know?

You can't have one without the other.

It's like an arena. It's like an empty stage set.

You just have to stand here and then stuff happens, you know.

You have entrances and exits like in the theatre

and if you think about it as an artist, you're the still point

and everything else is moving around you, so a lot of the work

that I'm doing with the road bridge is more about the act

of crossing as it is about the structure of the bridge as an object.

It's the fact that you're heading from the north of Scotland to the

south of Scotland and back and it's

that linking of communities and people.

Building the bridge, you know, absolutely transformed the country.

It transformed trade.

When you think of the volume of traffic that goes across that

bridge and did from the very beginning.

You know, people must have been just desperate to get this bridge open.

To go to Dunfermline, it was like a day out,

because you went on the ferry boat. Whereas now, you can

get over to Dunfermline in about 20 minutes, half an hour.

I think it opened up the whole of Scotland - for a lot of years

after that, everything came good.

A lot of work came into Fife through it.

Because before that, it was just a peninsula in Fife.

There was nothing there.

And it opened up a lot of industry, it really, really did.

For Fife itself, it increased the volume of companies that were

willing to put up factories.

Because trucks could get back and forward a lot easier,

and bigger trucks than could get on the ferries,

so it made a big difference, especially on the Fife side.

The Forth Road Bridge was finally completed in 1964

and was ready for its grand opening on 4th September.

People came from all over the country,

they came from Aberdeen and the islands on that opening day,

just so they could say they had been there on the opening day.

And of course the whole thing could have been a shambles,

because that day dawned absolutely solid fog.

We were notified there would be two Navy ships out in the river,

and when we came down in the morning and you listened, and a ship lying

at anchor, it rings a bell - one there and one there.

And then we started sailing in the fog,

out and in them with the compass.

It had been arranged that the Queen would drive over the bridge,

then get on the ferry

and then review the fleet, which was anchored under the bridge.

I was actually on the flagship. We were underneath the bridge.

Stern, the quarterdeck of the ship, was right underneath the road.

Not that we could see it, because it was in fog.

We had a Royal Marine band

playing on the quarterdeck, which

I believe could be heard from the bridge, but we couldn't see a thing.

So Her Majesty went up on the ferry and reviewed the fleet.

We never saw her, and she never saw us.

It was really foggy first thing in the morning, and we thought,

"Oh, this is going to be a disaster."

They had lots of tiered seats up on the plaza and they had...

I think they invited...

They had kids there from each school, flag waving.

..The Forth Road Bridge, which replaces Queen Margaret's Ferry.

May this bridge bring prosperity

and convenience to a great many people in the years ahead.

I got the privilege of hoisting the flag for the Queen,

then just as the Queen was coming across at 11 o'clock,

the fog started to lift, and we could see her car no bother.

We were hoisting the flag

and we were looking down, watching her coming across.

-I had mixed feelings on that day.

-So did I. That's our job finished.

There was a feeling of pleasure to have been involved

and finish the project, but sadness that it was all over and done with.

We all broke up and went our different ways.

When I'm working on the bridge, it is my bridge.

When the Queen cuts the tape, and everybody owns it then.

I was 18 at the time, when I hoisted the flag. It was a great feeling.

But three weeks after it, we got paid off.

That was the bridge finished.

But we got another three weeks out of it, another three weeks.

We all shook hands and all went our different ways.

There was a mad dash, of course, for everybody to drive over it.

Everybody wanted to drive over it or be the first to get over or

one of the first to get over the bridge that day.

We didn't have a car then.

SHE LAUGHS

With the exception of the Queen, every car across the bridge

had to pay a toll of two shillings and sixpence.

The presence of the tollbooth led to some unforeseen problems.

That was the biggest traffic jam that was ever seen in Scotland.

25 miles, the queues stretched back.

All the approach roads were blocked solid.

People were stuck for hours, people were getting out of their cars

and sitting on the grass verges.

On the day the bridge opened, the ferry service, which had

sailed across the Firth of Forth for generations, closed for ever.

We had been warned long enough.

I mean, it took four or five years to build the bridge anyway.

So you kind of knew that something was going to have to change.

It was a sad day when the ferries finished.

The four boats lay here for about a week between these piers here.

And they looked very sad, that was the finish of their life for them.

When the bridge opened, the pier shop,

the kiosk on the pier had to close. After 21 years.

So it was a big part of our lives.

I mean, we lived down there, really, and all of our family worked -

my mother and father, my sister and myself, did work in it, you know?

Mary Queen of Scots, carrying the Queen, was officially

the last passage across the Forth.

Unofficially, Captain Stephen Reid continued to sail

the Robert the Bruce all day, until the last of the queues had dwindled.

Later that day, he and the other ferry skippers

began collecting tolls on the bridge.

I finished about six o'clock and I was on the bridge about 6.30.

I came into the village to get changed and that, and there was

a young lad with a motorbike and I said, "Have you been across?"

Charlie Dewey. "Have you been across the bridge, the new bridge, Charlie?"

And he says, "No." And I says,

"Well, hold on, you're going with me in a minute." And he took me across.

And that was the first time we were across it.

After Jim Hendry had completed filming at the Forth Road Bridge

in 1964, he edited his film together and put his camera away for good.

His resulting film, The Long Span,

has never been seen on television or in a cinema...

until now.

Today, bridge workers past and present have been invited to

a screening of the original silent film.

I'm pleased that it's being seen by people and it's amazing that

50 years have passed since it was finished. I just can't believe that.

A lot of the diving jobs you did were just day-to-day diving work,

but at the end of the day on the Forth Road Bridge, it was something

very important, it was a structure that people would see, which again,

you think, I have left something behind when I go.

A lot of memories with the people, you know? Good crowd, really good.

I often walk over it and I often look up and say,

"How did I walk up and down that?"

It's a masterpiece, that road bridge, it's marvellous.

Marvellous how it is standing up to even the wind.

The last big gales, it was over 100mph, and it stood up to it.

I'm fair proud of it, fair proud of that bridge.

'Pride.'

Look at it, it's just mathematics in action, isn't it?

There's nothing on that bridge that isn't there for a reason.

There's no ornamentation on it, everything works on that bridge.

If you look at it, it was three and a half years of my life,

and I can drive over it in about one and a half minutes,

but it is satisfaction.

I can see something as an end product

to my civil engineering career.

If you want to see an example of Scottish steelmaking

at its best, you don't have to look further than the Forth Road Bridge.

'I felt it was quite a privilege to be allowed to'

go about any of the work places that were busy at the time.

And as I learned more about it, I was able to look forward to the stages

that were about to come and be ready to film them.

'We all think it's our bridge.

'You hear people speaking about it as if it belongs to them.

'Of course, it doesn't. It doesn't belong to any of us, but it's

'fantastic to think that all the people who work here feel that way.'

'I think it will be carrying traffic for a long time.

'I am hopeful that in 50 years' time, this bridge will still be here

'and carrying traffic and serving the communities

'both in the North and South.'

Ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump.

Ka-dunk, ka-dunk, ka-dunk.

Thump, thump.

Ba-doom, ba-doom, ba-doom.

-Ba-bang.

-Clunk, clunk, clunk.

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump,

Bump, bump, bump, bump.

De-dig, de-dig, de-dig.

Bloop, bloop, bloop.

De-duh, de-duh, de-duh. Yeah!